Frick Seeks to Expand Beyond Jewel-Box Spaces

The design for the expanded Frick Collection would include a six-story addition and roof garden.

Neoscape Inc.

By ROBIN POGREBIN

June 9, 2014

Joining a trend toward major expansions, the Frick Collection, known for its intimate, jewel-box galleries, will announce on Tuesday plans for a new six-story wing that will increase its exhibition space, open private upstairs rooms, and offer views of Central Park from a new roof garden on East 70th Street.

With its proposal, the Frick joins a roster of museums across the country that are enlarging, a sign perhaps of increased competition for the cultural spotlight, as well as a rebound in fund-raising since the dark days of the economic downturn.

In New York, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are planning new wings, and the Whitney Museum of American Art is nearing completion on an entirely new building.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is planning a new $500 million home on Wilshire Boulevard; the new $131 million Miami Art Museum (now called the Pérez Art Museum Miami) opened in December; the Cleveland Museum of Art just completed its eight-year, $350 million expansion and renovation; and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington has a $100 million expansion in the works.

Critics of other expansions — like MoMA’s — have called them unnecessary, too expensive or even hubristic. As the Frick rolls out its plans, it could face opposition for altering one of New York’s beloved historic buildings, a late Gilded Age mansion designed by Thomas Hastings for the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, where visitors can view a world-class assemblage of old master paintings, European sculpture and decorative arts.

“We and our public revere the authenticity, the intimacy of the space,” said Ian Wardropper, the museum’s director. “So this is a responsibility we take very seriously.”

The Frick’s plan has yet to be presented to its neighbors. Mr. Wardropper said the Frick “will be responsive to their concerns and transparent about the process.”

The project — which would increase space by nearly a third — will also require the approval of city landmark officials because it entails adding to the mansion, and is likely to draw scrutiny from some neighbors who live on the quiet residential blocks surrounding it.

The Whitney Museum of American Art, just five blocks away, fought for more than a year with Upper East Side residents and preservationists over building a nine-story tower behind a row of brownstones in a designated historic district and ultimately decided to move to another site altogether.

The Frick’s current spaces are too small to accommodate the crowds that have come for exhibitions, officials said, like last year’s paintings from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague, which featured Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring” and Fabritius’s “The Goldfinch.”

Lines for that show snaked around the block and visitors jammed the entrance. Annual attendance, typically around 300,000, spiked to 420,000 last year, and the museum’s concerts and lectures often have overflow crowds.

“We sell out on a regular basis and have to turn people away,” Mr. Wardropper said.

Frick officials said the new design, by Davis Brody Bond, the architecture firm behind the interior of the new National September 11 Memorial Museum, was intended to be sensitive to the integrity of one of New York’s beloved historic buildings. It would retain the Beaux-Arts vernacular of the original home and use the same Indiana limestone.

Officials at the Frick are taking a decidedly different approach from those at the Morgan Library & Museum, which is housed in another Beaux-Arts building, but whose new wing, completed in 2006, features a contemporary design of steel and glass.

The Frick, which is planning 60,000 square feet of new construction — a third of which will replace a 1977 addition — said it was not ready to disclose its budget. But officials said they felt sure they would have the money in hand to begin construction in 2017 and hope to seek some government support.

The building has undergone few changes since it was built. After Frick died in 1919 — and his wife, Adelaide, in 1931 — alterations were made by the architect John Russell Pope and the collection was opened to the public in 1935. In 1977, the museum added its entrance lobby, and two years ago converted an outdoor portico into indoor space. There have been three previous attempts to expand the museum in recent years, in 2001, 2005 and 2008.

The new addition would extend the building to the east — using space currently occupied by a gated garden that is not open to the public — and would connect the museum to its art reference library, which is on East 71st Street.

“We are a museum and a library,” Mr. Wardropper said. “Yet physically we’ve been separated all these years.”

The new building would be stepped, rising two stories, then three, then six, matching the level of the library. Carl Krebs, a partner at Davis Brody Bond, said the design visually extends the library as a single mass, but remains in keeping with the Frick’s “picturesque assemblage of smaller buildings.”

Just as Pope extended the Frick on the 71st Street side in 1935, so would this project now do so on the 70th Street, museum officials said.

“There’s a language that got set here architecturally at the very beginning and it has governed everything that’s happened ever since,” said William J. Higgins, a specialist in landmarks issues who is a consultant to the Frick.

The extension would give the Frick 50 percent more space for temporary exhibitions and 24 percent more for its permanent collection of some 1,200 works, by artists like Degas, El Greco, Manet and Renoir.

The Frick’s underground galleries — originally designed as seminar rooms — have low ceilings and limited square footage, making it impossible to show full-length paintings by the likes of Vermeer, Hals and Rembrandt. And the museum continues to acquire work.

Museum officials say the expansion will also allow them to open ornate former living quarters on the second floor to the public for the first time and to offer views of Central Park from a new roof garden.

“When people walk to the grand stair, there is kind of a velvet rope,” Mr. Wardropper said. “People are always craning their necks to try to see what’s up there. This would allow them to come up the stairs and see more fully how the house functioned.”

There would be conservation areas, education space, a new service entrance for loading in art, a bigger coat room and museum shop, more bathrooms and better access for disabled visitors.

Visitors currently have to switch from one motorized wheelchair to a smaller one in order to fit into the existing antiquated elevator. “What we have now is byzantine,” Mr. Wardropper said.

The renovation would include more office space for the full-time staff, which has grown to about 220 from about 160 over the last 25 years. But officials emphasized that this renovation will leave the core experience of visiting the Frick unchanged. “You feel the presence of the founder when you walk inside,” Mr. Krebs said. “That is something critical that can’t be lost.”